The Biggest Sucker

So, do you want to suck big time? What I mean is, do you want to be a black hole? You’re in luck, because this guide will teach you some of the basic tricks on how to be one of the biggest suckers in the universe!

But before we turn our attention to actually becoming a black hole, let us first start with the fundamentals. Let’s begin by talking about what two blokes named Newton and Einstein said about this thing called ‘gravity’.

Why I Am Attracted To You

Legend tells us that a fellow named Isaac Newton was inspired to formulate his theory of gravity when he saw an apple falling (not very far) from the tree. The truth of this story is not that important; what’s important is that Newton’s supposed observation made him realize that the same force that made the apple fall towards the ground also made the Moon go around the Earth! In fact, this is the same force that keeps the planets in orbit around the Sun, and that keeps the Sun and all the other stars of the Milky Way Galaxy in orbit around the galactic center (which is probably home to a gigantic black hole, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves).

As a matter of fact, Newton said that everything in the universe that has mass pulls towards it every other thing that has mass. In short, everything with mass attracts everything else with mass! This means that I am attracted to you, gravitationally speaking. After all, you and I both have mass. And yes, you are attracted to me too (gravitationally, of course, and perhaps otherwise). And yes, there’s also mutual (gravitational) attraction between myself and this nearby bottle of wine, and between myself and the binary star Sirius 8.3 light years away.

Newton: a science big wig.

Yes, I know, Newton’s idea sounds loony, to say the least. But, like most crazy-sounding ideas in physics, it comes with an equation that has proven effective for centuries. This equation is:

 F = (G *m_­A*m_B)÷d²

Here, F stands for the strength of the gravitational attraction between two objects A and B. On the other side of the equation, m_A stands for the mass of A while m_B stands for the mass of B; d stands for the distance between A and B and, finally, G is a number called the universal gravitational constant. We’ll get back to G later. For now, what’s important is that the equation above was proven true for hundreds of years after Newton wrote it down. More importantly, Newton’s simple equation explained so many different things, like why gravity is weaker on the Moon than on Earth, why the planets move around the Sun in elliptical orbits, and why angry birds shot from a sling follow a parabolic path.

You attract me...gravitationally.

But then the question arises: why don’t we feel our mutual (gravitational) attraction? If you have mass and I have mass and what Newton said is true, then where’s the love? The explanation lies with the number G in the equation above. The thing about G is that it’s a pretty small number. As a matter of fact, it is given by

G = 0.00000000006673 N m²/kg²,

which is miniscule indeed. Because G is so small, the strength of gravitational attraction between everyday things and between ordinary people (i.e. people aside from yo mama) is negligible. Let me give a specific example to illustrate this point. Say, person A has a mass of 50 kg and person B, who stands 1.0 meters away, has a mass of 60 kg. According to Newton’s equation above, the force of (gravitational) attraction between A and B is given by

 F = ( 0.00000000006673 N m²/kg²)*(50 kg)*(60 kg)÷(1.0 m)²

With a little help from a scientific calculator, the answer comes out to be around 0.0000002 newtons. (‘Newton’ is the measure of force in the same way that ‘meter’ is the measure of length.) An ant’s bite is many, many times stronger than 0.0000002 newtons.

To feel the strength of gravity, you need a really massive object like the Earth. For example, a person with mass 60 kg is attracted to the Earth with a force of around 600 newtons. If you want to know just how strong 600 newtons is, try lifting a 60-kg person.

Newton’s equation for the strength of gravity stands as one of the greatest achievements of any human mind. But there’s a tiny problem with Newton’s theory of gravity. Although it knows how gravity behaves, it doesn’t explain why there’s gravity at all. Why should everything with mass attract every other thing with mass? Why should the Earth pull us towards it? To these questions, Newton’s theory had no answer. We had to wait for some other bloke named Albert Einstein to supply us the answer.

Messy Hair, Neat Mind

Nearly two hundred years after Newton’s revolutionary theory of gravity, a Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein made the equally revolutionary theory that basically states that space and time should not be treated as distinct entities but should be united in an entity called ‘spacetime’. This theory is called the special theory of relativity, and it is where the world’s most famous equation, E = mc², comes from. What Einstein’s famous equation basically says is that mass (m) can be converted to energy (E). The quantity c is the speed of light, which is a little more than 1 billion kilometers per hour (nearly 300 million meters per second).

Central to special relativity, as the theory is also called, is the fact that nothing with mass can travel through space faster than the speed of light. In other words, the speed of light is the speed limit of the universe. Only light can go as fast as 1 billion kph, and no signal can go faster.

However, Einstein has not yet solved the riddle of gravity in his special theory of relativity. He had to struggle for 10 more years before he finally come up with his general theory of relativity, which stands as one of the finest products of human thought. In general relativity, as it is also called, Einstein explained that gravity is the curvature of space and time (that is, of spacetime). Massive objects, Einstein explains, warp the fabric of space and time around them, and this warping is what we observe and experience as gravity. So yes, spacetime has curves too, and everyone is attracted to these.

The universe has curves too -- and everyone's attracted to them.

The example is best illustrated by imagining a horizontally flat bed sheet that is held tout. Think of this bed sheet as the fabric of spacetime. When it is empty, spacetime is flat. When you place small things on this flat fabric, they stay where they are – there is no gravity. Next, imagine placing a bowling ball on the fabric. Notice how the bowling ball changes the shape of the fabric so that now, if you place small things on the fabric, they ‘gravitate’ towards the bowling ball – the bowling ball pulls the small objects toward it, which is basically what gravity is all about!

Attraction. There's the gravitational kind and then there's the other kind.

Now, Off To Black Holes!

Now that we know what gravity is (it’s the curvature of spacetime) and that it gets stronger as objects become more massive, we are almost ready to study the requirements that we must pass to become a full fledged black hole. But before we do, let us first look at some of the distinguishing characteristics of black holes.

When one fellow going by the name Karl Schwarzschild tried to solve Einstein’s equations, he noted that one solution described an object with very peculiar properties. One of the more amazing properties of this object is that it had a gravitational force so strong you need to travel faster than light just to escape its pull. But remember that nothing can go faster than light. Not even light could go faster than light! This means that when something gets too close to this object, they get sucked in and there is no escaping. Not even light can escape it! For this reason, such hypothetical object came to be called ‘black holes’. They’re called ‘black’ because they suck even light. And they are the universe’s biggest suckers! They suck everything from subatomic particles to stars.

The Standard Procedure

We are now ready to answer the question: how does one become a black hole? Well, here’s how.

1. Be a star. And don’t be just any star, but be a really massive one. A star like our Sun won’t do. To be safe, be a star that is around 20 times more massive than our Sun.

2. Die. Living stars are happily glowing orbs of plasma. That’s not what we want to be. We want to be black holes, and to be one you must be a dead star.

3. Furthermore, aspiring black holes like ourselves must follow the proper procedures when dying, which are listed as follows:

a. When you’re old, be a red supergiant. Red supergiants are among the biggest stars in the universe.

b. After becoming a supergiant, be a supernova. Supernovae are really bright explosions; they occur when a massive star reaches the end of its life. How many stars are there in a typical galaxy? Around billions. Even if you combine the brightness of all of these stars, a supernova is brighter still.

The Lives of Stars

c. Don’t be a neutron star. Many big stars retire to become neutron stars. But neutron stars don’t suck. Instead, they are just very dense (like most people). In fact, neutron stars can be so dense that a glass full of neutron star can be heavier than a skyscraper!

d. If you followed procedures a, b and c when dying, then congratulations, you are now a black hole! Go suck away at the universe.

The Short Cut

Let’s face it, not all of us can be stars. Luckily, there’s a short cut one can follow to be a black hole. Even better, it can be expressed in one sentence.

Be very, very dense.

But recall that density is a measure of how compact an object is. To be dense is to have a lot of mass packed in a very small volume. Mathematically, density is mass divided by volume.

To be as dense as a black hole, you must do either of the following:

1. Be really massive. However, you must do this without getting bigger. If you gain as much volume as mass, that won’t increase your density. How massive? If you are a person 5’ 7” tall, you must increase your mass to 1.6 million billion billion kilograms. That’s about 27 times the mass of the Earth. Good luck with that!

2. Here’s another option: compress yourself to a very small ball. For a person who masses 55.0 kg, you’ll be a black hole if you are compressed to a ball of radius 0.000000000000000000000000082 meters. That’s actually a lot smaller than a hydrogen atom. Again, good luck with that.

3. The easiest way to be a black hole is to be massive and small at the same time. Consider the Earth. It’s a pretty massive thing, isn’t it? Well, to make it a black hole, you simply have to compress it to a ball with radius 8.8 millimeters. The radius 8.8 millimeters is called the Schwarzschild radius of the Earth. If you compress anything to a ball the size of its Schwarzschild radius, it becomes a singularity – in other words, a black hole. The Schwarzschild radius of a 55-kg person is 0.000000000000000000000000082 meters while that of the Sun is about 3 kilometers.

Additional Guidelines

Here are additional guidelines on how to be a happy, sucky black hole.

1. Rip space and time. Black holes are singularities. Singularities are regions in space and time where the curvature of spacetime becomes infinite. Using our fabric analogy earlier, black holes are regions where the fabric of space and time has a rip.

When the universe is ripped, you get a black hole.

2. Don’t be naked. There is a hypothesis called ‘Cosmic Censorship’ that says that naked singularities don’t exist (with the possible exception of the Big Bang singularity, which partly explains its name). Singularities, according to this hypothesis, are always “concealed” by an event horizon, so that they are not visible to the rest of the universe. The event horizon of a black hole is the “surface of no return.” Since nothing that goes through the event horizon ever goes out, this means that anything that happens inside the event horizon will remain unknown to the rest of the universe.

3. Be hairless; black holes have no hair. What this means is that black holes have very few features. To describe a black hole, you just need to know its mass, its electric charge and how fast it rotates. If you have two black holes with the same mass, electric charge and speed of rotation, then you have no way to distinguish one from the other.

4. Be very disorderly. In physics, disorder is measured by a quantity called entropy. A very messy room has a high entropy while an organized room has low entropy. According to a principle called the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the entropy of an isolated system has a very strong tendency to increase with time. That is why you have to exert a lot of effort to keep you room neat and tidy but you don’t need to exert any effort at all to put it in disarray. Now, black holes are known to have very high entropy. As a matter of fact, they’re among the most disorderly things in the universe!

How do we know that black holes are very disorderly? It has something to do with the fact that disorderly systems are easy to describe. For example, how do you make a disorderly room? Just throw stuff around the place! How do you stack a random deck of cards? Just place any card on top of another without fussing which card is which. Orderly systems, on the other hand, are really difficult to describe. How do you fix a room to make it orderly? You have to put everything in its right place — the couch goes here, the table goes there, this painting is to be hanged here, and so on. How do you stack a deck where the cards arranged in increasing order? You have to put the aces first, then the ones next, then the twos after them, and so on.

Now, remember that black holes are hairless, which means that black holes are really easy to describe, which means they are very disorderly.

Happy Sucking!

So there, your very own guide to be a major sucker. I hope that helped a lot in your aspirations to be one of the universe’s most curious objects. Now it’s time for you to go away from me — I don’t want to be sucked in just yet.

Photo credits:

• ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu
• cse.ssl.berkeley.edu
• astronomynotes.com
• imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov
• eastpdxnews.com
• blogs-images.forbes.com

 “But It’ s The Solar System!”

In keeping with the spirit of Year of the Solar System, I am going to write about two of my latest obsessions in one post: the Solar System and the BBC series Sherlock.

Who will watch Sherlock and Watson?

Let me start by saying that I am a big fan of Sherlock. (And, in case you’re wondering: yes, the homoeroticism is one of my favorite aspects of the series.) After having said that, I will now proceed to criticize a view of science encouraged by Arthur Conan Doyle’s character. In other words, I am going to argue why Sherlock should give a damn about the Solar System.

In Doyle’s Sherlock novel A Study in Scarlet, Dr. John Watson was surprised to discover that Sherlock Holmes does not know, nor does he care, that the Earth revolves around the Sun. In Watson’s own words, Holmes’s knowledge about astronomy, among other things, was “next to nothing.” Holmes’s lack of knowledge about the Copernican theory is especially surprising given that he knows so much about things like the appearance of different kinds of cigar ash.

Uncle Sherlock says coke is good for your deduction.

In the novel, Holmes defended his cluelessness about astronomy by likening his mind to an attic with limited space. He said that he couldn’t be bothered to remember useless trivia that have no relevance to his work as a detective. After all, knowing what different kinds of ash look like helped him solve a case, but knowing that the Sun is the center of the Solar System did not. In the BBC series, Sherlock’s defense went like this, “Oh hell, what does the solar system matter? So we go round the sun.  If we went round the moon or round and round the garden like a teddy bear it wouldn’t make any difference.  All that matters to me is the work. Without it my brain rots.”

To this, all that Watson could retort was, “But it’s the Solar System!” I wonder why this line by Watson is not as popular as it should be.

A shirt depicting the Teddicentric model of the 'Solar' system.

Given that Sherlock Holmes probably has Asperger syndrome (the BBC Sherlock describes himself to be a “high functioning sociopath”), maybe we can forgive him for knowing so many trivial things but not knowing that the Earth revolves around the Sun. This should not, however, be used by people who want an excuse for skipping out on their basic science.

More importantly, Sherlock’s apathy towards fundamental scientific concepts betrays a deep misunderstanding of the structure of science. Let us look at two of the most glaring deficiencies in Sherlock’s conception of science, which are (a) his unfamiliarity with the principle of consilience and (b) his lack of appreciation for the principle of parsimony.

Consilience

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines consilience as the “linking together of principles from different disciplines especially when forming a comprehensive theory.” The word has been around for some time now, although it recently regained currency thanks to E.O. Wilson’s wonderful book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998).

A must read.

Although the dictionary definition is useful in its rigidity, I would like to use Wilson’s subtitle, ‘the unity of knowledge’, as my definition of consilience. Although this definition is rather vague, it’s just what I need to illustrate why Sherlock should give a damn about the Solar System.

I respect Sherlock’s view that one should not waste one’s brainpower on useless trivia. The basic concepts of science, however, are not useless trivia for the reason that there is a unity of knowledge in science. In other words, scientific theories cannot be treated in isolation of each other. If you do not understand how the Solar System behaves, then your understanding of gravity will be limited. If you have a limited grasp of how gravity works, then you easily end up believing a lot of wrong things, like how the positions of the planets at the time of your birth determine your destiny.

While a lot of scientific facts are better left to the specialists, there is a set of fundamental scientific concepts that every educated person should know because they are connected in countless ways to our daily life. Let’s call such scientific concepts keystone concepts. Keystone concepts are concepts one must comprehend in order to formulate a consistent theory of the world. And one needs a consistent theory of the world in order to make the correct decisions when necessary. (“Should I buy a cheap plot of land near the Marikina Fault Line?” “Are genetically modified crops bad for me?” “Should I vote for a politician who denies global warming?”)

Watson to himself: "Should I be roommies with this guy?"

The Copernican theory is a splendid example of a keystone concept. Sherlock, who is a detective, should know better that the Copernican theory is intimately linked with the theory of gravity, which in turn dictates how bullets behave when fired from the barrel of a gun; planetary astronomy, as it should be clear to anyone who understands science, cannot be separated from ballistics.

Other examples of keystone concepts in science are the atomic theory, the theory of evolution by natural selection and the germ theory of diseases.

What I find beautiful about scientific consilience is the fact that you do not need to memorize so many scientific facts in order to have a full grasp of the world around you. Like Sherlock, I believe that remembering so many facts that have no relevance to your life is wasteful and counterproductive. However, because there is consilience in science, knowing that the Earth goes round the Sun is not an isolated fact but should be part of a web knowledge that informs our view of the world.

Furthermore, consilience makes it easier to take in new facts because learning something new does not involve remembering it by rote. Rather, because of the unity of knowledge, new facts about the world can be easily incorporated into our worldview. Hence, knowing the keystone concepts of science such as the theory of evolution helps us save on brainpower rather than waste it. We can state this fact in another way: keystone concepts help us organize our knowledge in such a way that makes acquisition of new information easy. To use Holmes’s attic analogy in Scarlet, being familiar with the keystone concepts help us tidy up that attic that is our mind so that it becomes easier for us to decide which piece of information is truly useless and which is helpful.

As a matter of fact, in the BBC series, Watson gets the last laugh when Sherlock discovers that in order to solve the mystery, a little background knowledge on astronomy is helpful after all.

"I just googled 'star that shouldn't be there.'"

Parsimony

In dismissing the Copernican theory as useless trivia, Sherlock fails to grasp another principle of science called parsimony.

As it is usually presented, parsimony describes the simplicity of an explanation. The most parsimonious explanation is one that explains the most with the fewest assumptions. Closely linked with the principle of parsimony is the famous Occam’s razor. Occam’s razor says that in choosing between competing logically consistent explanations, one must choose the simplest explanation.

Occam's razor: shaving theories clean since 1495.

The parsimony I want to talk about in relation to Sherlock and the Solar System, however, is the simplicity that comes in accepting a scientific worldview.

The world around us is exploding with an almost endless parade of seemingly unrelated phenomena. However, if one has a scientific view of things, one discovers that beneath all this complexity is an underlying simplicity (a phrase I got from Jong Atmosfera).

Take the heliocentric model of the Solar System. In this model, the Sun is the center of the Solar System and the planets, along with asteroids and comets, revolve around it. This model of the Solar System beautifully, and simply, explains so many things that are relevant to our daily lives. For example, combined with the fact that the Earth’s axis is tilted, it explains why we have seasons. It also explains why we have tides, why our Moon has many phases, why the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and why a year is approximately 365 days long. Our knowledge of how the Earth goes round the Sun also helps us adjust our calendars accordingly so that we can better order our lives around the passage of the seasons.

On a more romantic but still scientific level, knowing how our Solar System is configured gives us clues to our origins, which in turn tell us a lot about who we are. It is our knowledge of our cosmic neighborhood that enabled us to surmise the fact that we are in truth made of stardust, and that we are products of more than 4 billion years of evolution on a lonely piece of rock that floats in the vastness of space. Far from being mere romantic knowledge, such realizations provide us with powerful insights into human nature. If natural selection operating on a bunch of stardust produced us, then what does that say of us? If we want to control our destiny as an individual and as a species, we must know the answer to this very important question.

And if Sherlock wants to read people like books, it would certainly help him to know where humans figure in the grand scheme of the cosmos.

"We are all stardust, my dear Watson."

Why You Should Give A Damn About The Solar System

Yes, you can live a full life without bothering to know the first thing about the Solar System. However, I hope I have convinced you that life is simply so much better knowing the Earth goes round the Sun. And it certainly is a lot less boring.

The Doctor: "But it's the Solar System!" (courtesy of Laura Birdsall)

Photo credits:

• redbubble.com
• beyondhollywood.com
• theculture.org
• blog.naver.com
• savagechickens.com
• e-booksdictionary.com
• mariboccful.tumblr.com
• xiiiskies.tumblr.com
• ladskipdepiss.tumblr.com

Year of the Solar System

It's the Year of the Solar System!

Happy Year of the Solar System! The planets are so happy to greet you they decided to move too close to each other just so that they could fit in a family portrait to show you. Also, so as not to dwarf their smaller siblings, the giants of the family had to move a lot farther from the camera.

Shown below is a more candid family portrait. Here, the planets are shown in their correct size relationships.

All planets great and small. (I know, Pluto should not be there.)

But how far are the planets with respect to each other? When I taught high school astronomy two years ago, I tried to draw a Solar System that’s to scale on our classroom’s white board. Good luck to me! I ended up either trying hard to include Jupiter in my drawing or attempting to carefully draw the crammed orbits of the inner planets just so that they’re distinguishable from each other. In the end, I used a number of steps to illustrate the relative distances of the planets to each other. (“If the Sun were here, then Mercury would be so and so paces away.”)

Before we go to the relative distances involved in our cosmic neighborhood, let us first have a word about the units we use to measure the Solar System.

Measuring the Solar System

The average distance of the Earth from the Sun is about 150 million kilometers. If you could fly to the Sun in a spacecraft that travels at three times the speed of sound, it would still take you more than 5 years to get there! So that we don’t have to be inconvenienced by humongous numbers in describing distances within the Solar System, astronomers invented the astronomical unit (AU). 1 astronomical unit is equal to 150 million kilometers, the average distance of the Earth from the Sun.

How Many Steps from the Sun?

Using the astronomical units, the distances of the planets from the Sun can be written in convenient, sizable numbers. These numbers are shown in the table below.

The second column is labeled average orbital radius because a planet’s average distance from the Sun is indeed the (average) radius of its orbit.

Now, let us make our mini Solar System. Imagine the Sun to be where you are right now. (Better yet, imagine you are the Sun.) If you take 4 steps from your current position, you’d get to where Mercury is. To get to Venus, you have to take 7 steps from where you are, while you need to take 10 steps to get to the Earth. Meanwhile, you need to take a good 15 steps to get to Mars’ obit. So far, so good.

But wait, notice that to get to Jupiter, you need to take no less than 52 steps! Jupiter, it turns out, is more than three times as far from the Sun (that’s you) as Mars is. Why is there so much empty space in between Mars and Jupiter?

Well, as most of us know, the space between Mars and Jupiter is far from empty. Rather, the space is populated by a swarm of rocks called the asteroid belt. Some of the asteroids are so large they are considered dwarf planets. Many scientists think that they are rock fragments that failed to coalesce into a planet during the Solar System’s formation because of the constant gravitational tug of neighboring Jupiter.

But don’t imagine the asteroid belt to be a densely clustered group of flying rocks. Although the asteroids number by the hundreds of thousands, there’s plenty of space for them to distribute themselves in.

Asteroid Belt

Now let’s go back to our walk through of the Solar System. We learned that if the Earth is 10 paces from the Sun, then Jupiter is 52. Meanwhile, Saturn would be 96 paces from the Sun. Saturn is nearly ten times as far from the Sun as the Earth is! About twice as far out, at 192 paces, is Uranus. (No, I will not make a Uranus joke). Neptune, the farthest planet (yes, get over it), is 301 steps from the Sun.

As I am writing this, I am in a room whose biggest dimension is around a hundred steps (that’s “how far” Saturn is from the Sun). When I place textbook on one corner of this room (the “Sun corner”), I can hardly see it from the opposite corner (the “Saturn corner”). However, from the Sun corner, the positions of Mercury (4 steps), Venus (7 steps), Earth (10 steps) and Mars (15 steps) are literally within spitting distance. I highly doubt it if I can spit as far as the orbit of Jupiter (52 steps).

The Ends of the Solar System

Don’t worry, I did not forget about Pluto. Just because astronomers do not consider it a major planet anymore doesn’t mean I stopped loving it.

Before we “walk to” Pluto, let me first get this out: nothing “happened” to Pluto. No, it did not become a moon of Neptune. It did not even shrink. Above all, it did not become a star!

If you’re wondering why I had to say this, good for you. Many people – and I mean many – believe that something happened to Pluto to deserve its “demotion” from being a major planet to being a dwarf planet. And yes, some people think it became a star. (Well, in a sense, it became a ‘star’. But you know what I mean.)

Pluto and its twin, Charon, from the surface of Nix. Pluto's third moon, Hydra, is also within view.

I think the misunderstanding surrounding Pluto’s planethood (or stardom) reveals the natural human tendency to be essentialists. In other words, most people still think that to be a planet, one must have the essence of a planet – one must possess planetness. That truth, however, is that ‘planet’ is just another word for ‘biggish object orbiting a star’. In this case, the star is our Sun. And we get to decide how big is big. The problem with Pluto is not just that it’s really small, it’s that we found at least one other object orbiting the Sun that’s bigger than Pluto. That object is Eris, named after the goddess of discord and strife. Along with Pluto, Eris is part of the Kuiper Belt, a second belt of rocks orbiting the Sun. Most of the Kuiper Belt lies beyond the orbit of Neptune. Other members of the Kuiper Belt have names like Sedna, Xena (the warrior princess), Makemake and Haumea.

Eris and its moon, Dysnomia.

Artist's impression of the Kuiper Belt (courtesy of Don Dixon)

Now, let’s go back to our walk through. Recall that in our mini Solar System, you are the Sun. 10 steps away is the Earth, 52 steps is Jupiter and 301 steps is Neptune. Pluto is, on average, 395 steps from you. The Kuiper Belt starts at around 300 paces. To get to where Eris is, you have to walk 1,000 steps from where you are. If you think the Solar System ends there, then you couldn’t be more wrong. The Oort Cloud, a hypothetical body of rocks and comets, is no less than two thousand times farther from the Sun as the Earth is. That means that if the Earth is 10 steps from you, then the Oort Cloud is 20,000 steps away! Some astronomers even think that the heliopause, which could be thought of as the outer boundary of the Solar System, is no less than 500,000 steps away. The inner planets are indeed in the innermost part of the Solar System.

Oort Cloud

Sola!

That concludes our overview of the vast dimensions in our own cosmic neighborhood. I hope the “walk through” inspired you to make a mini Solar System in your own backyard. And I hope that the next time you look up to the heavens, you will see the grandeur that held thrall all the great minds throughout the ages.

Photo credits:

• www.nasa.gov
• www.solarsystem.nasa.gov
• www.universetoday.com
• www.wikipedia.org
• www.cosmographica.com
• www.theiamfamilyoflight.com

DepEd, Y U No Teach Science to Kids?

The news that our Department of Education decided to remove the ‘Science’ subject in the first and second grades released a flurry of criticism and commentary in the past two months. Since science education is one of the main advocacies of the Filipino Freethinkers, the issue was tackled in a couple of articles on this site. To read the articles, go here or here.

Now, if there’s one thing worse than DepEd’s dropping ‘Science’ in the first and second grades, then it is their reason for doing it. In the words of Education Secretary Br. Armin Luistro, they decided to jettison science in order to “decongest the Basic Education Curriculum (BEC) and to make learning more enjoyable to young learners.” In other words, they believe that in postponing the teaching of science, they are doing the students an act of kindness.

Science, the School Bully

That many people believe science is not “child friendly” is sad on so many levels. The other levels have already been excellently discussed in the other articles on this site. I want to concentrate on this one level in particular: DepEd and the Philippine public as a whole view science as a congestion because they do not understand the first thing about it.

Given how they view the subject, I am in fact happy that DepEd dropped ‘Science’ in Grades 1 and 2. I don’t want an institution that views science as a congestion to teach it to the future generation because if they do, they will only end up alienating the kids to science.

In fact, we are better off with a public ignorant of science than a public alienated to science. Scientific ignorance can be remedied by a few years of quality education and public information. I know this because I am the product of our public elementary school system, and when I entered high school I was almost a science ignoramus. A few years of good education cancelled all my years of bad education.

Bad science teaching causes alienation toward science.

Before we move on, let me illustrate how bad my elementary education was. I had one science teacher who taught us that a monkey-eating eagle was a monkey. I also had one science teacher who was a creationist, and another who was a moon hoaxer. I also remember being scolded by another teacher for bringing encyclopedias to school and allowing my classmates to revel in them. The encyclopedias were “too advanced” for us, that teacher said. To be fair, I had good elementary teachers too. Sadly, the effect of one bad teacher requires the correction of five good ones.

Now let us proceed to the main point. There is a fundamental difference between being simply ignorant of science and being alienated to it. Good education can only be effective in minds that are not yet alienated to science. For my part, I am very thankful for my few good science teachers – who are, by the way, glowing embers in the dark world of our public education system – for keeping my sense of wonder alive throughout all those years of horrible science teaching. I believe I wouldn’t be writing this essay right now if it were not for the fact that my sense of curiousity survived all those years in a public elementary school.

The ivory tower of science: where science is exiled by bad science teaching.

However, when you have teachers believing that science is a mere body of knowledge to be handed down to the kids for their uncritical consumption, you will end up with students knowing some but understanding nothing. Worse, you might even end up with minds that acquired a resistance to learning. This is what I mean by alienation to science. If you shove scientific facts down a student’s throat without providing that fact some human dimension, that student will view science as a form of punishment. They will then be conditioned, à la Pavlov’s dog, to run for the hills whenever they smell a hint of science in the air. Sadly, such a conditioning has been going on for decades now, as indicated by the uncontrollable spread of the “nosebleed” meme. One wonders whether these people actually imagine Science as the school bully repeatedly punching them in the face until their noses bleed.

Bad Science: “I’mma make your nose bleed!”

Worse than a nation that views science class as our local equivalent of Western culture’s gym class is a public that has been so confused by bad science education that they can’t tell science from pseudoscience. A public that jumps into any bandwagon containing the words ‘quantum’, ‘ions’, ‘vibration’, ‘crystals’, and ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’ is a public that is not only easily hoodwinked by charlatans, but is also a breeding ground for such charlatans. But can you blame people who are easily impressed by ‘biodynamic agriculture’ and ‘ultrasupermegahyper-ionic water’ given that their science teachers simply flooded them with scientific jargon most of the time? Teaching so many scientific facts without teaching the scientific method and critical thinking is cultivating a culture of unquestioning acceptance of anything that sounds esoteric. Look around you and ask whether this is not what has been going on in our science education system for some time now.

Esoteric = Science? Unfortunately, many people think so.

The First Thing About Science

Earlier I made the bold claim that some of our leaders do not know the first thing about science. But what is the first thing about science? I believe we all know and agree why science must be taught to kids as early as possible. But why can it be taught as early as possible?

Well, the first thing about science is that it is founded on a set of values. In effect, science education is values education. A person cannot understand science without imbibing at least most of its virtues.

Science is a very human activity.

Science is difficult, yes. Science does not end in being amazed and awed, indeed. Science is not all about the happy-happy-joy-joy, true. That is why when science is taught, you do not simply teach it as a body of knowledge and not even as a body of theories. When science is taught, it must be taught as a human activity. And like all human activities worth pursuing, it requires a certain set of attitudes.

Among the virtues required by science are curiosity, attentiveness to detail, ambition, and intellectual honesty, all of which can be taught to kids as early as possible. In fact, for many kids these virtues need not be taught but only encouraged and reinforced.

Children are so naturally curious about the physical world that one should be impressed at how good our educational system is in killing their sense of wonder. Science can be a very difficult subject. This is why wonder and awe are necessities of science education and not merely ornaments or embellishes. For a kid whose curiosity has survived years of bad education, the uphill journey to scientific understanding is not only worthwhile, it is enjoyable for its own sake. On the other hand, without an eagerness to learn new things about the world, the rigors of science will be corporal punishment to a student.

Musing on the subtleties of bathroom hydrodynamics.

Similarly, children are naturally ambitious. Sadly, years of watching television and cultural conditioning skews this sense of ambition by a great deal. (Kid A who wants to be an artista was cheered on by her relatives while Kid B who wants to be an astronaut was pitied for being an odd little girl who’s probably a tomboy.) And it doesn’t help that science teachers do not impart a hunger for excellence, either. In most science classes, grades are the ultimate reason for listening to the teacher. Forget about discovering the cure for AIDS or solving the efficiency problem of solar energy; as long as you pass the subject or got a 90+, you’re doing fine. What many people fail to see is that ambition is what propels cutting-edge science. No matter how many practical technologies were spawned as byproducts of sending space probes to distant worlds, no one can deny that humans shoot rockets to the sky primarily to push the boundaries of what we can do.

Being a difficult subject, the rigors of science also build a character of discipline and patience. After all, science is all about looking at and dealing with the world in an orderly manner. The discipline of mind that science (and mathematics) teaches is something that is rarely matched by other subjects. It might sound like a stretch, but teaching a kid to keep her room in order and teaching her that there is order in the universe have a lot in common. I can’t think of any parent who does not want her child to imbibe the sense of orderliness that science teaches best.

Speaking of discipline, science also requires another kind of mental regularity in that it demands constant and consistent use of critical thinking and logical reasoning. From a very early age, children can show signs of these in the way they value evidence and logical consistency. For example, some kids can start calling bullshit on tall tales even while very young. However, science cannot thrive on mere flashes of critical thought. For a child to have a scientific mind, that child must be taught to consistently demand evidence for claims.

Demand for evidence whenever appropriate. (It’s always appropriate.)

Finally, being a human activity, science requires a healthy mix of cooperation and competition. In teaching science, one must teach both group learning and self-learning.

Science Education as Values Education

The whole point of the preceding discussion is to show that science is not so far from GMRC (Good Manners and Right Conduct) after all. And if we can and should teach GMRC from a very early age, the same must hold true for science.

After all, the contents of science are secondary to its methods and values, because the facts and theories can change but the values don’t. Concentrating on the contents of science is what causes our public’s alienation with science. Hence, the loss of two years of content-centered science education is, as Garrick Bercero also argued, not such a big loss. In fact, I even view it as a gain. A lot of ignorant but receptive minds is better than a host of minds resistant to scientific learning.

I believe that science subjects from the first grade to the sixth should be very light on their content and should concentrate on the values, especially on the sense of wonder and ambition. Grade school science should also emphasize activity (observing, experimentation, questioning, self-learning) and not knowledge.

As I have said many times, science is very hard to master. But with a sense that in doing science you are part of a human enterprise that seeks to solve the Sphinx’s riddle of the universe, all the difficulties of science becomes part of the fun of it. A proper science education should breed kids who, when faced with a difficult scientific problem, say “Bring it on!”

Hence, before we demand more hours of science education, we must first demand that our science teachers understand the first thing about science.

Science will go nowhere without ambition.

Photo credits:

• knowyourmeme.com
• nytimes.com
• christianhumanist.com
• ihatebullies.com
• rickygrice.blogspot
• blogs.discoverymagazine.com

Can Everyone Be A Texan?

Many opponents of the RH Bill and of population management in general deny that the world is overpopulated. To support their denial of overpopulation, conservatives usually claim that everyone alive today can fit inside the state of Texas, leaving the rest of the planet blissfully empty of humans. A moment’s thought is enough to come up with definitive arguments against this everyone-can-be-a-Texan scenario. Unfortunately, the said scenario keeps on getting parroted, and by no less than our own anti-RH senators like Tito Sotto.

So how do we elegantly debunk the we-can-all-fit-in-Texas scenario and other similar baloney “arguments” commonly used by RH Bill opponents? The answer comes from the environmental sciences.

My Very Own Patch of Earth

How does your lifestyle affect the environment? To answer this question, environmental scientists William Reese and Mathis Wackernal invented the simple but powerful concept of ecological footprint. Your ecological footprint is the total area of bioproductive land and sea needed to sustain your lifestyle. The name ecological footprint is therefore well chosen because it essentially measures how heavily you tread on planet Earth.

The Energy Library gives the following definition of a bioproductive patch of Earth:

 1. able to produce and sustain living organisms

2. specifically, describing land area that is capable of providing natural substances that support human activities; e.g., land used for growing food crops

In other words, a bioproductive patch of Earth is an area that produces goods and performs services that have economic value to humans.

Now, let us get back to ecological footprint. I wanted to know what my ecological footprint was, so I went here to take a test that gives me a rough estimate of its value. After taking the test (I tried my best to give the most accurate and honest answers possible) I found out that my ecological footprint is around 1.8 hectares. That’s 18,000 square meters of the Earth’s sea and land that’s dedicated to support my lifestyle. (I tried other tests, and they gave me answers ranging from 0.90 hectares to 5.5 hectares. I think 1.8 hectares is the most accurate. I encourage the reader to take other tests, for example this or this.)

How do I make sense of my 1.8-hectare footprint? To make it easier to explain my ecological footprint, I tried splitting it into several divisions. (The divisions that follow are mine. Environmental scientists have yet to reach a consensus on how to divide the ecological footprint.)

A meat-eating diet translates to a large dietary footprint.

One portion of my 1.8-hectare footprint consists of the total land and sea area needed to grow and process everything I eat. This is called my dietary footprint. You can think of my dietary footprint as the total area of all the farmland, orchards and fishing areas where the things I eat are grown or caught.

Of course, I need water too. A good fraction of my ecological footprint consists of my freshwater footprint. This is the area covered by all the freshwater sources tapped to give me water for drinking, bathing, washing my clothes, flushing the toilet and many more.

The Angat Dam and Reservoir is part of our freshwater footprint.

Another part of my ecological footprint is the patch of forest and shallow seas needed to absorb my yearly carbon emission. My carbon emission is the total amount of carbon dioxide I directly or indirectly add to the atmosphere every year. For example, when I commute from home to work, I use buses, cars, and trains that run on the burning of fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is one byproduct of the burning of fossil fuels. The area needed to absorb my carbon emission is the now well-known carbon footprint. Notice that your carbon footprint is only a subset of your ecological footprint. Reducing one’s carbon footprint is good, but it’s not good enough. (Carbon footprint is more naturally measured in metric tons.)

Stanford Kay's carbon footprint infographic.

And yes, let us not forget all the waste products I produce. The area in the landfill taken up by all the non-biodegradable garbage I produce in a year can be lumped under my waste footprint. Other parts of my waste footprint include the total area required to recycle my recyclable waste and decompose my biodegradable waste.

What you throw away is still here to stay. And it becomes part of your garbage footprint.

In my day-to-day life I also need go to school, to work or to some places of leisure. To do all of this, I need to use roads, railways, airports and seaports. The said places I mostly share with other people. My share in all these built-up areas I want to call my built-up footprint. Also included in my built-up footprint are my shares in government buildings and other public structures such as shopping malls and places of recreation.

My energy footprint is my share in the area taken up by all the power plants, refineries and LPG factories built to produce the energy I consume in a year.

Ecological footprint is a measure of how heavily we tread on planet Earth.

The connections in the web of nature are delicate and intricate. Just because an area in the Amazon Rainforest remains “untouched” by humans does not mean that it is unaffected by human activities. Similarly, when we overfish one species, we are not affecting only that species but are affecting an entire food web. Overfishing tuna, for example, may greatly affect countless other marine species. My share in the human impact on habitats I’d like to call my biodiversity footprint. Biodiversity is a measure of the richness of life. There are several ways to measure biodiversity. One way is to count the number of unique species living in an ecosystem. Another measure called the Simpson index takes into account the percentage of each subspecies or breed in a given habitat. Sometimes, the number of unique habitats in a given region is also used to measure biodiversity.

What else can one find in my 1.8-hectare ecological footprint? Let me see. How about that patch of forest cleared to supply me all the paper and other wood products I use in a year? And how about that patch of mountain quarried to mine the minerals required to supply me all my metallic needs? The area needed to produce the raw materials and the goods I use in a year I’d like to lump under my goods footprint.

The foregoing breakdown of a person’s ecological footprint is far from exhaustive (and even farther from authoritative). However, I tried to outline the major components of an average person’s ecological footprint to provide the issue some perspective.

Other environmental scientists have other ways of dividing the ecological footprint.

According to estimates published by the Global Footprint Network in the National Footprints Account 2010 Edition, the ecological footprint of the average Filipino is 1.3 hectares. This is a bit higher than India’s 0.90 hectares and nearly five times lower than the Netherlands’ 6.2 hectares. The United States’ average footprint is a whopping 8.0 hectares. (Other estimates peg the average Dutch footprint at 5.9 hectares and the average American footprint at an unbelievable 9.7 hectares.)

The average citizen of the world has a footprint of 2.7 hectares. However, the average citizen of a developed country has a 6.1-hectare footprint while the average citizen of a developing country only has a 1.2-hectare footprint. This disparity comes from the differences in lifestyle and available technologies. People living in poor countries don’t have a small footprint by choice. If you barely have enough money to feed yourself, then you cannot consume much. This translates to a small footprint. However, it is known that as a developing country makes its way out of poverty, the average footprint of its citizens sees a dramatic increase.

How Many Earths Are We Gonna Need?

If everyone on Earth lived like me, how many Earths would we need? How about if everyone on Earth lived like the average Dutch? What if everyone lived like the average American? And is it true that everyone alive today can live comfortably as Texans? Before we can answer that, let’s go through some preliminaries.

It is first important to understand the concept of biocapacity. The biocapacity of a region is a measure of the population it can support. In more technical terms, biocapacity is a weighted total of the area of bioproductive land and sea in a given region. Being a weighted total, when we count the biocapacity of the world, the Sahara Desert will not contribute much even though its area is quite large. On the other hand, the biocapacity of the seas in the Philippines would be exceedingly high even though their total area is less than that of the Sahara Desert. In terms of biocapacity, two of the biggest giants are the Amazon Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef system. The Philippine seas are not far behind.

Biocapacity is measured in global hectares (gha.). The global hectare unit of measurement was invented to accommodate the fact that not all patches of Earth are equally productive or capable of sustaining life. However, on average, 1 global hectare is equal to 1 normal hectare. Therefore, when I say 1.30 global hectares, you can simply think of it as 1.30 normal hectares. (As a matter of fact, I have been using this simplifying assumption in the previous paragraphs.)

The total biocapacity of the Earth is estimated to be 12 billion global hectares. That is, the Earth has 12 billion hectares of land and sea that is capable of sustaining human life. If human civilization uses less than 12 billion hectares, then it can exist for an indefinite period of time. Humans can exist for very long if they use up less than 12 billion hectares of Earth because nature has the ability to repair itself even after human damage has been done. A civilization that uses less than 12 billion hectares of the Earth has a sustainable existence.

Recall, however, that the average person on Earth has an ecological footprint of 2.7 hectares. There are more than 7 billion people alive today. If every one of them has a footprint of 2.7 hectares, this puts total footprint of humanity at around 19 billion hectares. In other words, human civilization is currently exploiting around 19 billion hectares of the Earth’s land and sea for all of its operations.

But wait, something seems wrong. Didn’t I just say that the Earth has only 12 billion hectares of sustainably useful land and sea? But why is human civilization using 19 billion hectares? What’s going on here?

The discrepancy in the Earth’s total biocapacity and human civilization’s total ecological footprint results in what is called unsustainable existence. At present, human civilization is degrading the Earth’s capacity to support life by operating with a deficit of 7 billion hectares.

If you divide 19 billion hectares by 12 billion hectares, you’d get something close to 1.5. This means that to sustainably support human civilization’s current operation, we’re going to need 1.5 Earths – that is, 1½ Earths. But we’ve only got one planet. This doesn’t sound good.

And it only gets worse. Remember that the world’s population is growing at an alarming rate. The human population growth rate in the year 2011 was estimated to be 1.8%. If this does not decrease significantly, then by the year 2016 the world population will be at 7.4 billion! Assuming the average ecological footprint per person remains at 2.7 hectares, by 2016 the total ecological footprint of human civilization is already 20 billion hectares. By then we’ll need 1 and 2/3 Earths!

But the assumption that the average ecological footprint per person remains at 2.7 hectares is unrealistic. All indicators show that as Third World countries emerge out of poverty, their ecological footprint will increase by as much as 400%. Assuming a steady rate of development in the Third World, the ecological footprint of the average person in the year 2016 will increase to 2.9 hectares. If 7.4 billion people each have a footprint of 2.9 hectares, this means that by 2016, humanity’s total footprint will reach 21.5 billion hectares. By that time, we’re going to need 1 and ¾ Earths to sustain such an operation!

One and three quarters Earths is hardly the size of the state of Texas. There goes the everyone-can-be-a-Texan scenario down the drain!

Here’s another way to play the game. It is widely known that for most people living in the developing world, the American lifestyle is the paragon of progress. For example, middle and upper class Filipinos show all the signs of wanting to live like Americans. But what does the American lifestyle cost planet Earth? Recall that the average American has an ecological footprint of 8.0 hectares. If all the 7 billion people alive today were to live like Americans, the total ecological footprint of human civilization would be a gargantuan 56 billion hectares! To support such a footprint, we’re going to need 4 and 2/3 Earths!

But what if we live like Western Europeans? They’re not as consumerist and wasteful as the Americans, after all. If we all live like the average Dutch, then our footprint per person will be 6.2 hectares (this will include the area of all the cannabis farms, oh yeah). If all the 7 billion people alive today were to live like the Dutch, then our total footprint as a civilization will be 43 billion hectares. We’ll be still running a huge deficit since the Earth has only 12 billion hectares to offer. To support 7 billion people living like the average Dutch, we’ll need 3 ½ Earths. It’s not as bad as the 4 2/3 needed when we’re going to live like Americans. However, 3 ½ Earths is still something we don’t have.

We have but one planet Earth. We have but one Pale Blue Dot.

That pale blue dot is all we have for now. And we are overtaxing it.

How Many Philippines Are We Gonna Need?

Now let us take the numbers game to the local level. Recall that the average Filipino footprint is 1.3 hectares. That is in fact a small number. If all of the 7 billion people alive today were to have a footprint that size, we’re going to need less than one Earth.

Sounds great? Nope. Here are the reasons why.

First, the fact that you are reading this implies that your footprint is probably larger than 1.3 hectares. How do I know this? Well, you have Internet connection at home, don’t you? If you don’t, at least you have money to spend on computer rental. Either way, the fact that you are reading this implies that you are more affluent that the average Filipino. As of November 2011, there are 101 million Filipinos alive. A person who can go online and read this essay is certainly in the upper quartile of that 101 million and even probably part of its upper 10%. (Yes, you don’t have to be rich to be part of the Philippine’s most affluent 10%. After all, ten percent of 101 million is more than 10 million.)

So yes, to have a 1.3-hectare ecological footprint you have to live like the average Filipino, which means you have to be really poor. Of course, Mr. or Ms. Average Filipino does not exist in real life, but if you take a quick look at the standard of living of most Filipinos, you will get an idea of how our hypothetical Average Filipino will live if he were alive.

Second, even with the seemingly small 1.3-hectare ecological footprint, we are already over taxing our beautiful country. According to the National Footprints Account, the Philippine islands and its surroundings seas have a total biocapacity exceeding 115 million hectares. That’s pretty big for a country the size of the Philippines. As a matter of fact, the Philippines contains nearly 1% of the world’s total biocapacity. This should be a small wonder given that the Philippine seas are among the richest in the world. However, all this richness is being degraded because we are running on an ecological deficit. If all the 101 million Filipinos alive today were to have a 1.3-hectare footprint, the national footprint of the Philippines will be 131 million hectares. This is obviously larger than the 115 million hectares we have. The difference between our national footprint and our national biocapacity translates to environmental degradation. Environmental degradation includes but is not limited to deforestation, land and water pollution, habitat and biodiversity loss and resource depletion. Also, because of our current economic set-up, this also translates to social inequity.

The Philippines is 3rd best in the world. In terms of deforestation, that is.

How Can We Save the Earth? How Can We Save the Philippines?

There is an umbrella answer to the questions above: We must reduce our ecological footprint. But how doe we do that? Now that is the subject for another post.

For now, the lesson I want all of you readers to take home is this: We can all fit in Texas, but we can’t all live in Texas. Since one obvious way to reduce our ecological footprint as a nation and as a civilization is to curb the population explosion, population management measures like the RH Bill are both important and urgent. Anyone familiar with the quadrants of priorities knows that such important and urgent bills must be top priority. Unfortunately, many people in power have very skewed sense of priorities. For those of you who know how to prioritize properly, I urge you to keep on supporting the RH Bill. The fight for the RH Bill is a fight not only for the Filipina mothers, it is also a fight for Mother Earth.

Image Sources:

• electrictreehouse.com
• core77.com
• ecologytamra2011

Typhoon Sendong: An Avoidable Tragedy

With the death toll recently going over 1000 deaths, the number of human lives ended by Typhoon Sendong is heartbreaking. What makes it more tragic, however, is the fact that many of these deaths could have been avoided.

It is good to see that the government is doing its job of helping the survivors of the calamity in the cities of Cagayan de Oro (CDO) and Iligan. (You too can help the survivors. Start by clicking here.) However, it would have been better to see the government preventing a calamity of this magnitude from happening in the first place. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The prevention would have been as simple as making decisions that were scientifically informed. As this report shows, scientists have already warned both local and national government of this calamity. By not heeding the scientists’ warnings, some government officials are guilty of indirectly causing the tragedy in CDO. 

The aftermath of Typhoon Sendong and the flashflood it caused.

Scientific Literacy in the Philippines

We live in an era when human life should be most enjoyable. For what else is all our scientific knowledge if it is not used to make everyone alive live a long, safe, happy, and healthy life?

We at Filipino Freethinkers believe that the principal purpose of modern science is the improvement of the human condition. This is why we do our best to defend science, combat pseudoscience, and further the cause of science education in this country. (To see the most recent example, read the excellent article Of Heroes and Hoaxes: Painting a CNN Hero in a Dangerous Light).

But defending science and advocating its consistent application in all aspects of life is difficult here in the Philippines. For one, many of the powers that be apparently have a stake in the public’s scientific illiteracy. A good example of this is the CBCP’s opposition against the passage of the RH Bill. The proliferation of many pseudoscientific objections to the bill is another sign that the cause of scientific education here in the Philippines still has a long way to go.

To say that our public is scientifically illiterate is an understatement. As a case in point, recent reports that many young Filipinos take soda-detergent mix as contraceptives reveal the dismal state of reproductive health education in our country.

That the Philippine public is scientifically illiterate is one disheartening thing. That some of our reputable newspapers publish pseudoscience and baloney is another. However, the fact that our government does not make decisions based on scientifically sound judgment is the most tragic of all. Equally sad is how our government needs wake-up calls like the Typhoon Sendong tragedy to finally listen to scientists. But as a Filipino saying goes, “Aanhin mo ang damo kapag patay na ang kabayo? [What will you do with the fodder if the horse is already dead?]”

How Sineskwela and Grade School Science Could Have Avoided the Tragedy

One sad aspect of the public’s relationship with science is how people find science “nosebleed inducing” and intimidating. Even as I write how science could have helped avoided the Sendong tragedy, I can already feel the expectation that a lot of jargon will be involved in the explanation. Let me dispel this expectation as early as now by reiterating the message of this section’s title: to avoid a tragedy similar to the Sendong tragedy, all we need are lessons from the science-centric children’s TV show Sineskwela and our grade school science teacher. These are the lessons the government should’ve heeded three years ago.

Lesson number one: Do not live within a river’s flood plain because this area is naturally flooded on a regular basis. Many people seem to think that humans can live anywhere they want to. But a smart Grade 6 student should be able to tell you that an area known as a flood plain always surrounds rivers. The flood plain of the river is an area close to it that is regularly flooded during heavy rains. It is therefore imperative for the government to disallow people from buying land and building homes within this area. Both local and national government, however, did nothing to prevent many people from building their houses close to the rivers of Lanao del Norte and Misamis Oriental.

The flood plain of a river is the area near its banks that is naturally flooded at a regular basis.

Lesson number two: Excessive logging is bad and more trees in the mountains is good. During heavy rains, the roots of big trees trap a lot of the rainwater. This helps prevent flooding and this is why the government should protect forested mountains from greedy logging and mining companies. However, these very rich companies easily bribe our corrupt government officials. The greedy mining companies are especially active in metal-rich CDO. (Even the very name of Cagayan de Oro tells us how much gold there is under its mountains.) When mining companies dig for metals in the mountains, they must cut the trees. To maximize their profit, these companies often try to escape their responsibility of replanting trees, and the government often allows them to get away with it. But we already know that this leads to the the following equation: bald mountains + heavy rains = flash floods = countless preventable deaths.

[Edit: I have been informed that there are no large-scale mining activities in Misamis Oriental as the previous paragraph suggests. Recent developments also suggest that illegal loggers and the people living in the mountain side are more responsible for the  loss of forest cover in the mountains of Misamis Oriental.]

An opent-pit mine in the Philippines.

Lesson number three: Global warming is changing our climate. The island of Mindanao used to have the kind of climate that rarely experiences strong typhoons. This is why people living in Mindanao are not traditionally prepared for strong storms unlike people living in typhoon-prone areas. But since global warming is changing the world’s climate, places that are not regularly visited by typhoons, like Mindanao, must expect more typhoons in the years to come.

The Philippines has seen the effects of abnormal weather patterns in recent years.

Lesson number four: Global warming will make “wetter” and more vicious tropical typhoons. Because of global warming, storms will now have more rain than usual. This is why flooding is a greater problem now than it used to be. Another effect of global warming is to make typhoons more unpredictable in terms of strength, speed, and path taken. This is why Sendong attacked CDO with the element of surprise.

Lesson number five: Global warming causes sea levels to rise. Because the planet is getting warmer, the polar ice caps are melting. As these ice sheets melt, they add water to the world’s oceans. This causes the water level in the oceans to rise, increasing the risk of flooding in low-lying areas such as the coastal towns and cities of Misamis Oriental.

Typhoon Ondoy (2009) was another evidence of the change in our country's weather systems.

Scientific Literacy = Human Lives Saved

The fact that the public and the government ignored the simple science lessons given above shows a dangerous lack of understanding of how the Earth works. If Filipinos understood this, they would have more respect for its power and they would be able to prevent its power from ending so many lives.

Although we grieve for the victims of tragedy caused by Sendong, we must not fail to learn from this event. Both the public and the government can help prevent a similar tragedy by learning more about how the Earth works and how its workings are being altered due to climate change.

Let this tragedy be a painful reminder to the public and the policy makers that in this day and age, making decisions based on a high level of scientific literacy is a matter of life and death.

Do what you can to help the survivors in CDO. And do what you can so that this does not happen again.

The RH Bill and Exponential Growth

In my article What the Debate on the RH Bill Should Not be About, I argued that overpopulation is a non-issue in debates over the passage of the RH Bill. There I reasoned that the battle over the RH Bill is a women’s rights battle and that overpopulation has little if anything to do with it. While I am still convinced that the RH Bill is a women’s rights issue, the following observations forced me to reconsider the relationship between the bill and the Philippine population problem:

• The world population has exceeded 7 billion. What’s worse is that it shows no signs of stabilizing on its own anytime in the foreseeable future (contrary to the claims of the laissez-faire advocates).
• The successful population management measures in many countries around the world, particularly in neighboring Thailand and Vietnam, have yielded very positive effects. In fact, the said countries have already overtaken the Philippines in terms of social and economic progress.
• Our legislators, particularly Senator Sotto, continue to use overpopulation denial myths as arguments against the passage of the RH Bill.
• Conservative estimates have pegged the Philippine population at 101 million as of July 2011.^[1]
• The Philippine population grew by 1.904% in the year 2011.^[1]

The above observations should be enough to convince any rational person that the RH Bill is not only important but is urgently needed. Sadly, many of our politicians aren’t really of the rational sort.

Seven billion. That's a pretty big number, dontcha think?

Sotto Voce?

On a Senate interpellation on the RH Bill held last December 5, Senator Tito Sotto parroted the same old ridiculous arguments that supposedly prove that the world is not overpopulated. Worse still, Sotto went as far as to claim that the world would never experience overpopulation. In his own (?) words, “These people think that they are smarter than God. Sa tingin ba nila gagawa ba ang Diyos ng mundo na mapupuno? [Do they think God will create a world that will be overpopulated?]”

"Dapat bang maging senador 'to?" "HINDE!!!!11!!!1!!"

Sotto’s argument is blatantly invalid in two ways. First, it is legally invalid; such a theological argument has no place in a secular interpellation (and that goes for you too, Senator Miriam Santiago). The fact that such a theological argument can be used in a Senate interpellation without drawing any objections from the other senators is enough to give any secularist a conniption. Second and perhaps worse, Sotto’s argument is logically invalid; it does not follow that if there is a god, then that god will create a world that will never be overpopulated.

Setting aside the invalidity of his arguments, Sotto’s claim that the Philippines will never be overpopulated is also demonstrably, disturbingly and dangerously false. The key to debunking Sotto’s absurd claim is contained in just two words: exponential growth.

Three Chinas in a Philippines

This year, the Philippine population experienced a growth of 1.904%. If this population growth rate is maintained, the Philippine population will double in a mere 36 years and 9 months – around 37 years.^[2] If there are 101 million Filipinos alive today, that means there will be 202 million Filipinos alive 37 years from now. Give another 37 years (that’s 74 years from now) and there will be 404 million Filipinos alive. Fast-forward to another 37 years (111 years from now) and our population is already at 808 million; by then our population is rapidly speeding toward the 1 billion mark. Does this pattern sound familiar? Why of course, it is nothing but the geometric progression that we’ve met in Part 1 of this article. By now you should know that if our population keeps on growing in such a pattern, then we’re in for a lot of trouble.

Shown below is a table of the projected population of the Philippines in the next two centuries under the assumption that our population growth rate remains steady at 1.904%.

Under this steady growth rate scenario, the Philippine population would exceed 1 billion somewhere around the year 2130. Our great grandchildren, perhaps even some of our grandchildren, would still be alive at that time and would be among the 1 billion Filipinos trying to fit inside a country 32 times smaller than China. By the end of the 22^nd century, the number of people trying to fit inside the Philippines is more than thrice the number of people living in China today. By the year 2500 the Philippine population is already, quite simply, astronomical. Now matter how look at it, the Philippines can be overpopulated and it will be overpopulated if we will do nothing about our population growth rate. Take that, Tito Sotto.

The Philippine Population Growth Rate: Good News and Bad News

Three objections can be leveled against the previous hypothetical scenario. The first one goes like this: Malayo pa naman ang taong 2196 ah, bakit natin po-problemahin yun? [The year 2196 is still many, many years away, why should we bother about what’s going to happen then?] The degree of myopia implied by this objection is, sad to say, exhibited by many of our politicians and citizens. This can be remedied only by good moral education. But this remedy takes a long time, perhaps several generations. We need to act on the problem now. The only way to expedite the solution is to replace our myopic politicians with wise, far-seeing leaders. For this purpose we have the democratic process of voting our future leaders.

The second objection is worse than the first: Malapit namang magugunaw ang mudo. Bakit pa tayo magpapakahirap sa pag-ayos nito? [The world is going to end soon anyway. Why waste your effort making it a better place?] Unfortunately, many people, some of them even intelligent, sincerely hold this view that the world is ending soon. It is our job as freethinkers and as people who love the earth to think of creative ways to convince these people to care for the future of our planet. We might need to convert them to freethought or to more liberal versions of their religion. We might also try to convince them that if they believe that the god they love created this world, then they should do everything to take care of it. Whatever our strategy is, we must do everything we can to decrease the number of people who believe the world will end soon because if we don’t, then it surely will.

The third objection is a rational one: The steady growth rate scenario is an oversimplification because the Philippine population growth rate isn’t really constant but is in fact decreasing. This objection is in fact valid. (It does not, however, negate the fact that the scenario in the previous section disproves Tito Sotto’s claim that the world will never be overpopulated.) Official records show that the Philippine population growth rate has been on a general trend of decline over the past decades. The Philippine population growth rate over the past few years is shown in the table below. ^[3]

There is good news and bad news in the trend of the population growth rate.

Let’s begin with the good news. The decline in our population’s growth rate is either an effect or an indicator of the following:

• Our government’s previous family planning programs have been, to a certain extent, effective.
• Filipino women have been slowly gaining empowerment over the past decades.
• The Filipino youth have been slowly gaining accurate RH information in recent years.
• Philippine cultural values have shifted from the valuing the quantity of life to valuing the quality of life.
• The Church’s anti-contraceptives stance is quickly losing support among Filipinos.

Now off to the bad news. I will first state them in somewhat technical language. Later I will unload them in layman’s language. Here they go:

• While fertility rates have been steadily declining in middle- to high-income families, the fertility rates in low-income families have not dropped; in fact, studies show that they have increased in the period between 1997 and 2000(see Reference [7]).
• The disparity between our country’s fertility rate (somewhere between 2.79 and 3.19^[4]) and population growth rate (1.904%) is an indication that there remains a high infant mortality rate in the Philippines.
• The decline in our population growth rate is better modeled by a decreasing exponential and not a decreasing linear plot.^[5]

Now let us explain the bad news in layman’s language one by one.

First bad news: Families with means voluntarily undergo family planning while poor families continue to have more babies than they can feed. (But who doesn’t know this already? Apparently the anti-RH camp.) So even though the population growth rate of the Philippines is declining on average, the decline is not uniform across all income levels.  This causes the top of the social pyramid to become thinner and the base to become wider. If this keeps on going, this means that in the near future our society will be composed of fewer and fewer people with means and more and more people who cannot feed their families. (Wait, am I describing the future here or the present?) An economist of any feather will tell you that this is really bad news.

A Philippine porridge line. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

Second bad news: If there are many children born for every woman in the Philippines, then why is our population not growing as rapidly as it should? Surely this is not because of an increased natural death rate; our natural death rate is in fact declining. The only explanation available is that many infants are dying. High infant mortality rate is an indication of high birth rates among low-income families. That brings us back to bad news number one.

Third bad news: Yes, our population growth rate is decreasing, but its rate of decrease is slowing down over time. This means that as years go by, it won’t decrease fast enough to curb our growing population. For example, by year 2100, our population growth has decreased but is still at 1.52%. That’s 89 years from now when our population growth rate is at 1.904%! End story: our population will keep on growing exponentially if we do nothing about it. The decline in population growth rate is not enough to curb the exponential population growth that has been going on for decades now.

The graph below shows the projected Philippine population in the coming decades as assessed by the U.S. Census Bureau. According to the graph, the Philippine population will be at 150 million in the year 2050. Note that this projection is around 75% of the value projected in Table 1 for the year 2048.

Projected growth in Philippine population. From the U.S. Census Bureau.

Lessons From the Losing CEO

If we learned anything from Part 1 of this article, then it is that one should never underestimate the power of exponential growth. We are therefore faced with the following fact: Our population is already at 101 million and it continues to grow exponentially. Even if our population growth rate is declining, it is not declining fast enough to curb the dangerous rise in our numbers. Worse still, studies show that while families with means tend to have fewer children, poor families tend to have many.

But we’ve seen that there’s good news. As long as you give families and especially women the freedom to choose, they will choose to keep their family size manageable. This is shown by the significant decrease in the fertility rates among middle to upper class women over the past decades. Poor families and poor women in particular, however, still do not have the means and the freedom to choose the family planning method that suits them best. This explains why the fertility rate among low-income families remain dangerously high. All the facts indicate, however, that if we give them the power to choose, low-income families will voluntarily plan families of manageable sizes (1-4 children). Note that they will do this for their own good without knowing that they are, in effect, helping to solve a national problem.

Herein lies the magic of the RH Bill: It solves two different problems in one stroke. On the one hand, it will give poor families the power of options in planning their family. On the other hand, its end effect will be the curbing of our population growth. The RH Bill will do these and more. At the most basic level, the RH Bill will give women their basic rights to family planning services and it will give the youth their basic rights to scientific and age-appropriate education.

The RH Bill: An Urgent National Concern

Never forget that one does not kid with exponential growth. If we are to secure our future as a country, then we must manage our population now. In fact, we should have started decades ago.

Congress and Senate must pass the RH Bill by January of next year, or else it will be too late. Remember, we are racing against time in our battle against the most powerful force in the universe.

Reproductive Health = our Republic's Health.

* * *

Notes:

^[1] Taken from the webpage of index mundi, Reference [4]. See also References [5] and [6] for official data.

^[2] The equation for any kind of exponential growth is similar to that of compound interest: FV = PV(1 + i)ⁿ. Here, FV is the future value (of an investment or of a population), PV is the present value, i is the rate of increase and n is the number of times the value is increased. In our case, PV is 101 million, the present population of the Philippines. If it doubles, this means that FV is 202 million. Meanwhile, i is 1.904% = 0.01904, the population growth rate. We want to solve for n, the number of years it takes for PV = 101 million to become FV = 202 million. This is accomplished by dividing both sides of the compound interest equation by PV, then taking the logarithm of both sides and then finally using the properties of logarithms. The solution is going to be n = 36.75.

^[3] See References [5] and [6] for the official estimates. Reference [4] provides more recent, unofficial estimates. Reference [8] provides projections based on UN studies.

^[4] The high estimate is from Reference [4], the low estimate is from Reference [8].

^[5] The best fit exponential curve in the population growth rate has an equation of f(x) = (2×10^-7)e^-0.01x with coefficient of determination R² = 0.935. I tried the best-fit linear curve, and its coefficient of determination is only at R² = 0.932; even then, the slope of the linear trend line is negligibly small so that difference between the predictions of the linear plot and those of the exponential plot will not be very great.

* * *

References:

[1] Miller, G. Environmental Science, 10th ed, 2005.

[2] Campbell, N.A., Reese, J.B. and Mitchell, L.G., Biology, 5th ed, 1999.

[4] Index Mundi. <http://www.indexmundi.com/philippines/population_growth_rate.html>, accessed 15 December 2011.

[5] National Statistics Coordination Board. <http://www.nscb.gov.ph/secstat/d_popn.asp>, accessed 15 December 2011.

[6] National Census Data via the National Statistics Office. <http://www.census.gov.ph/data/sectordata/popproj_tab1r.html>

[7] Asian Development Bank, Poverty in the Philippines: Income, Assets and Access. 2005.

[8] Costello, M.P. and Casterline, J.B., Fertility Rate Decline in the Philippines: Current Status, Future Prospects. 2005

So Long and Thanks for all the Hitch

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), the spice and sting of the Four Horsemen, will be sorely missed. Hitchens did not have a deathbed conversion and his statements during the months before his death guaranteed that nobody is to take advantage of his death and sickness to further their personal agenda.

Hitchens the Dionysian.

But why expect a deathbed conversion from a bon vivant who uttered the following words?

“Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.”

Taunting a Dead Man

While Hitchens will be sorely missed, Rick Warren will be sorely with us still. In the wake of Hitch’s death, this “friend” of Christopher’s mustered up the gall to tweet the following words:

“My friend Christopher Hitchens has died. I loved & prayed for him constantly & grieve his loss. He knows the Truth now.”

I believe it is one thing to be a Christian and to assert the superiority of your beliefs, and it is completely another thing to rub your beliefs on a dead man’s face. True, it is Warren’s right as a Christian to believe that Hitchens must be somewhat surprised right now to find himself in the afterlife. (Although we who know Hitch are sure that he can wit his way into heaven or hell, depending on whether he wants great climate or great company.) True, it is also his right to voice out this belief. True still, it is his right to place a thin veneer of taste over this belief by simply calling it “the Truth” with a capital T.  But doing it to someone who cannot answer back is simply going below the belt. Six feet below, to be precise.

“So how’s the weather down there, Hitchens m’boy?”

Madalyn Murray O’Hair once said,  “It is everybody’s right to be insane.” To that I would like to append the clause, “… as long as their insanity causes no harm to others.” Warren’s insanity in this particular instance is well within the bounds of allowable insanity. There is nothing immoral about Warren’s tweet. My argument against Warren does not come from ethics but from aesthetics. After all, the dead person he taunted in his tweet was a debate connoisseur for his entire career. One must not forget that to Hitchens, the content of a good argument will go to waste if it is not delivered with style and a few tastefully added cuss words.

Imagine one player losing a one-on-one basketball game to a good opponent. When the winner left the court, the loser kept on shooting the ball and counting his scores and declaring himself the winner of the match; Warren’s taunting a dead Hitchens is like this but worse. To me it looks like Warren was not able to get a good shot when Hitchens was around, so now that Hitch is gone, Warren thinks that it’s time to take all those missed free throws. Unethical? No. Pathetic? Yes. With a capital Y.

Truth with the capital T

Another sorry aspect of Warren’s tweet is his confidence on waving the banner of Truth with a capital T. This confidence of course he shares with millions of other fundamentalists, Christian or otherwise. There is nothing new in Warren’s religious hubris, but let me grab this opportunity to compare this religious hubris and the confidence of reason.

Hitchens was confident, as am I, that there is no afterlife. Both he and I share the conviction that this life is better lived without the “false consolation of religion” and its attendant hopes of heaven and threats of hell. Meanwhile, Rick Warren is confident, as are millions of believers, that we are dangerously wrong. And so they try their best to save us from fire and brimstone and to bring us to everlasting life. I sincerely appreciate the sentiment, but no thanks, I’m fine with my rational worldview.

So this is the situation: People disagree and everyone thinks they are in the right. Well, okay. That’s how the world is, messy and beautiful. What makes it ugly is that few if any fundamentalists appreciate the nuances between being confident of one’s belief and being absolutely certain of them. The appreciation for such nuances is what makes us freethinkers, believers or unbelievers, act rationally toward people who disagree with us. This appreciation gives us the ability to be considerate and to come up with reasonable compromises without compromising our intellectual conscience and values. On the other hand, the lack of appreciation for these nuances is not only behind Warren’s hubris. It is also behind the hubris of the terrorists who flew the planes into the Twin Towers. It is the hubris behind Hitler’s genocide. It is the hubris behind many people’s apathy toward environmental degradation and climate change. Now I am not saying that Warren’s nearly innocent tweet is comparable to the 7/11 attacks. What I am saying is that these actions, although very different, stem from the same root sentiment – the feeling of absolute certainty about one’s beliefs. In god is not great, Hitchens wrote, “The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.” Might I add that in this day and age, such immaturity is dangerous to us as a species.

I guess half of being a freethinker is being able to appreciate the aforesaid nuances. In light of its many profound effects, therefore, I think it is very important that we freethinkers share such appreciation with as many people as we can. And that goes for you too, mister Rick Warren. If nobody can convince you to become an atheist, I hope at least someone can convince you to lower down your hubris level. After all, isn’t humility a supposedly Christian virtue?

We’re All Gonna Die…Someday

Yup, we’re all gonna die someday. For Christopher Hitchens, that day has already come. But contrary to what Warren said, that day is not the day to know the Truth. Truth is something we strive for constantly throughout our lives, it is not a single destination but a series of stops along the journey of reason.

Thanks for letting us hitch, Hitch!

This is the same journey Christopher has been taking his entire life. We should consider ourselves lucky Christopher went up that road ahead of us, because now we can be assured there will be lots of open bars and dancing clubs along the way.

Good bye and thanks for all the laughter, Christopher Hitchens. It’s been great hitchin’ with ya, Hitch!

A Tale of the Two CEOs

One day, two bold CEOs decided to play a game of chess where the winner gets to ask anything he wants from the loser. After the game, the winning CEO asked the losing CEO to choose between two payments. The first payment involves the losing CEO giving half of his company’s assets to the winning CEO. The second payment involves placing 1¢ in the first square of the chessboard, 2¢ in the second square, 4¢ in the third, 8¢ in the fourth and so on until all the 64 squares of the chessboard are filled. Thinking that it will allow him to get off easy, the losing CEO agreed to the pay the winning CEO the second reward. But the losing CEO made a very serious mistake. In the process of trying to pay the winning CEO the reward, the losing CEO ended up going bankrupt and buried in debt. In fact, the losing CEO may never be able to give the reward money even if he spends his whole life working for it.^[1]

Double, Double, Double….Jeopardy!

Human intuition evolved to understand linear progressions and patterns only. For many everyday purposes, this intuition is a quick and effective tool in assessing odds and projecting future values. The losing CEO’s big mistake is that he used the said intuition on an example where it is not applicable, an example that involved not a linear progression but a geometrical one.^[2]

When you add up the terms of an increasing geometric progression, what you get is exponential growth.^[3] As with geometric progressions, the human brain is notoriously ill equipped in understanding the power of exponential growth. This is shown by the fact that, without the aid of mathematics, almost all of us find it difficult to understand why the losing CEO made such a grave error. In order to comprehend the gravity of the losing CEO’s mistake in choosing the second payment option, let us get rid of our intuition for the moment and let us turn to mathematics.

Imagine starting with x of something. If you double that number, it becomes twice the original, 2x. If you double the previous result, you get four times the original, 4x. If you keep on doubling the most recent result, you’d successively get 8x, 16x, 32x, 64x and so on. Notice that doubling once gives you 2x or 2¹x while doubling twice gives you 4x or 2²x. Meanwhile, doubling thrice gives you 8x or 2³x and doubling four times gives you 16x or 2⁴x. Following this pattern, we can see that doubling x an n number of times gives you 2ⁿx.

Paal Paysam's chessboard.

Recall that the losing CEO started with a mere 1¢ (that is, x = 1¢). By the 8^th  square (the last square in the first row) he is required to double the original 1¢ seven times. This means that he must place 2⁷ times 1¢ on the 8^th square. Using a simple calculator, one can easily confirm that 2⁷ = 128. This means that the 8^th square must contain 128¢ or $1.28. So far, the losing CEO still feels he’s having it easy. However, when he reaches halfway through the chessboard (the 32^nd square), he would have doubled the original value 31 times. This means that the 32^nd square must contain 2³¹ times 1¢. Using a calculator, one can compute that this amounts to 2 147 483 648¢ or around 21.5 million dollars! But the tragedy of the losing CEO is only beginning; even though at this point he is halfway through the chessboard, the losing CEO is still very far from paying half his due. By the time he reaches the last chess square, he is going to need a whopping 92 million billion dollars! But wait, there’s more. The said 92 million billion dollars is for the last square only. Adding up the amount of money he must place on all 64 squares of the chessboard, the total amount of money the losing CEO owes the winner is approximately 184 million billion dollars!^[4]

The Curious Case of Exponential Growth

Here’s another example of how wildly counter-intuitive exponential growth is. Imagine starting with a piece of paper (of thickness 1.0 mm). Fold that paper into two halves so that its new thickness is twice the original. Now fold it again so that its thickness is four times the original. If you repeat this process just 42 times,^[5] you end up with a piece of paper that will extend from the surface of the earth of the surface of the moon!

Going expo.

A very peculiar aspect of exponential growth that the human brain finds so hard to understand is the fact that if something grows exponentially then the present value is greater than all the previous values combined. For example, notice that the amount of money the losing CEO must place on the 5^th square, for example, is greater than the total amount of money he must place on the 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th squares. This is true even for the 64^th square – the amount of money it must contain is greater than the sum of the contents of the remaining 63 squares.

Exponential Crises

Albert Einstein once said, “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.” Since the mechanism behind compound interest is exponential growth, the previous example shows that Einstein’s humorous hyperbole is only partly so.

Big companies, especially banks, tap into the power of exponential growth to get rich. But big companies pay decent sums to their actuaries and analysts to deal with the number shuffling involved in compound interests (in the interest of compounding their profit and compounding your debt). In the absence of such expertise, unaided human intuition will more often than not fail in assessing problems involving exponential growth.

An individual’s failure to appreciate the power of exponential growth usually leads to debt crises.  The losing CEO is just one (rather fantastic) example of the victims of the human brain’s inability to grasp exponential growth. To give a more common example, the many people who are buried in credit card debts are similarly victims of the failure of human intuition to grasp the full force of compound interest and the mechanism behind it, exponential growth.

In many ways, the losing CEO represents human civilization. Many of the problems we face today as a society stems from our failure to assess the power of exponentially growing quantities around us. Like the losing CEO, we use our linear human intuition to analyze situations involving geometric progressions and we end up engulfed by the problems this wrong judgment caused.

Three of the greatest problems caused by our failure to grasp exponential growth are:

• the human population explosion
• the rapid (or should I say rabid) increase in human demand for resources leading to the even more rapid depletion of natural capital
• the rapid increase in industrial activity leading to uncontrolled increase in the generation of pollution and waste

I will write about the other two global problems in future articles. In Part 2 of this article, however, I will concentrate on the first and perhaps most important the three – human population explosion. I say it is the most important because it is the key to solving the other two problems; the problems of resource depletion and environmental degradation cannot be fully addressed without addressing population explosion. Finally, it is the human population explosion that I will write about in Part 2 because it is an urgent national issue that is intimately related to the debates regarding the passage of the RH Bill.

Click here to read Part 2.

 * * *

Notes:

^[1] Adapted from a version of the legend of Paal Paysam told on Reference [1].

^[2] An arithmetic progression is a sequence of numbers in which the next number in the sequence is just the previous number plus a constant. Examples are the sequence {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …} and the sequence {4, 7, 10, 13, 16, …}. In the first progression, the constant being added is 1 while in the second it is 3. A geometric progression, on the other hand, is a sequence of numbers in which the next number in the sequence is just the previous number times a constant. Examples would be {5, 15, 45, 135, 405, …} and {2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, …}. In the first sequence, the constant being multiplied is 5 while in the second it is 2. Notice that the second progression is simply the progression our losing CEO is having a problem with. Geometric progressions, however, can also be decreasing, just like the sequence {4, 2, 1, ½, ¼, …}.

^[3] The sum of the terms of an increasing geometric progression increases exponentially as you increase the number of terms being summed up. For those who know their math jargon, this can be expressed by saying that the partial sum of a monotonically increasing geometric series diverges. The result for a decreasing geometric progression is similarly tricky to the human intuition and is at the root of Zeno’s Paradox. The apparent Paradox is resolved if one understands that a sum of infinitely many numbers can be finite if the numbers being summed up form a decreasing geometric progression. That is why 4 + 2 + 1 + ½ + ¼ + … = 8, even though you are adding infinitely many numbers.

^[4] For those who recall their college calculus, the formula for the nth partial sum of a geometrical series with 1 as its first term and 2 as the common ratio is given by the formula s_n = (rⁿ – 1)/(r – 1). Here, r = 2 and n = 64. The total amount of money the losing CEO must place in all the 64 squares of the chessboard is just equal to the partial sum s_n.

^[5] Douglas Adams is God.

 ^{* * *}

References:

[1] Miller, G. Environmental Science, 10th ed, 2005.

[2] Arfken, G. B. and Weber, H. J., Mathematical Methods for Physicists, 5th ed, 2001.

The main motivation of a true thinker for writing her thoughts and ideas should, I believe, be this – so that someone may disagree with it. For a person may exert all the efforts of her mind to doubt her thoughts and to see her most subtle and deep-seated prejudices in an objective light, the fact stands that there will always be biases and predispositions that only another thinking mind will see. As such, it is the duty of every person who thinks, who mulls over, who ponders, and especially of those who claim to worship doubt, to submit their thoughts to the careful scrutiny of  others.

“Judge, that you may be judged,” said the philosopher Walter Kaufmann. So in the face of the world, this is what every freethinker, every heretic, every critic of dogma must say: “Here I stand under the microscope, ready to be examined. Here I stand in front of the jury, ready to be judged. Ecce homo.”

All of philosophy originates from two things – burning curiosity and uncompromising honesty. All the other rudiments of good philosophy like eagle-eyed insightfulness, logical rigor and exacting intellectual standards, passionate skepticism, a deep moral and existential concern for matters of life and death and, of course, a teary-eyed wonder, spring from these two wellsprings, these two cardinal virtues.

Curiosity, because philosophy is naught without deep reflection, and reflection is impossible without curiosity. But being reflective is not enough. Many people spend all their intellectual energies reflecting on deep questions, but they end up holding on to their comforting beliefs. But such comfort-beliefs are like comfort pillows, nice to hug and cuddle; however, they’re mostly air and won’t stand against a moment of honest scrutiny. So why are they held on to dearly, and not only by the all-too-many, but also by those who are intelligent and reflective?

Continue Reading

[Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of other members of the Filipino Freethinkers.]

There are some laws that a country should pass if it is to make progress into the 21^st century. The Reproductive Health Bill (RH Bill) is one of them. But there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the said proposed bill. For this we should congratulate the Catholic Church hierarchy, especially the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), for making a controversy out of something that shouldn’t be controversial at all. (Media sensationalism has its role in this one, too.)

Debate rages on. Now, that’s supposed to be a good thing. After all, a world without arguments is a world without truth. However, a lot of time has been wasted on discussions that have nothing or little to do with the very real and urgent problem at hand.

Here are just some of the things that debates on the RH Bill, like the upcoming “Grand Debate” on GMA, shouldn’t be about.

1. Overpopulation and population control: Even if the Philippines were not over populated, the RH Bill should still be passed. Although it is intimately related to the population issue, at the heart of the RH Bill is an issue of human rights, not population control. “Do poor people have the right to have state-supported family planning options and accurate information? Do our young people have the right to scientifically accurate and age-appropriate sex education?” To oppose the RH Bill is to answer these questions with a no. That is, to oppose the RH Bill is to deny poor women of the right to accessible reproductive health options. To say no to the RH Bill is to say that our young people should not be given correct information regarding their reproductive health and sexuality.

Don’t get me wrong. Like any rational person, I would like to see the CBCP get creamed in a debate on overpopulation. But time is running out. We can discuss the population issue some other time. For now, we must tackle the heart of the problem, and the heart of the problem is an issue of human rights, not overpopulation.

After all, the RH Bill is not a One Child Policy. The RH Bill, unlike the Catholic hierarchy, will not impose anything to anyone; it will merely provide options to those who don’t currently have them. The Bill won’t stop people from “going out to the world and multiplying” if they want to. Its goal is to help those who need help. And they need help now.

2. Artificial contraception: Yes, the RH Bill will make condoms and pills available. But aren’t they already? It’s not like artificial contraceptives are illegal in this country. Bottom line: the RH Bill is not about artificial contraception, it is about the right of the poor, especially of poor women, to have access to the birth control method of their choice. This gets buried under many debates, so I will have to stress it again: The RH Bill will give poor women a choice. When the RH Bill becomes law, the government won’t go around forcing women to take birth control pills, or sneaking into people’s houses at night and to perform vasectomies on sleeping husbands. Unlike the Catholic Church, the RH Bill won’t make the state shove anything down anyone’s throat.

However, when the RH Bill gets passed, the poor will then have many options suddenly opened to them. So to be anti-RH is not to be anti-contraceptives but to be anti-poor. If you really are anti-contraceptives, why waste your time fighting the RH Bill? Why not go fight the Big Pharma companies that are producing and distributing those “evil” oral contraceptives. Or why not go fight Captain Condom, the super-elastic superhero who can withstand tremendous stress, strain and pressure, and who will stop at nothing to kill our sacred, God-given sperm cells?

3. Elimination of poverty: No RH Bill proponent or supporter would ever claim that the RH Bill is the answer to all the woes of Philippine society. However, the RH Bill is an essential part of a program to combat poverty. Once the RH Bill becomes law, poor women will gain control over their fertility. This will increase their social mobility and will therefore increase their capability to contribute to the country’s labor force. This will also allow poor families to better allocate their limited resources to the children they chose to have. The end result is that our country’s young will end up being better taken care of. This translates to more Rizals and Benigno Aquinos. Or, if you want, more Pacquiaos.

4. Pre-marital sex: It is not the state’s duty to endorse, much less enforce, a particular religious morality. The only morality that government is mandated to enforce is secular morality. This means that as far as the state is concerned, the morality or ethicality of a sexual act has nothing to do with whether priests, pastors or imams have given their go signal. If the bishops want to meddle with the sex lives of their followers, they must not ask the government’s help to do it. (After all, in some areas, especially in those concerning children, they seem to know just how to do it. And they know how to keep it to themselves as well.)

In fact, based on a secular morality, it is the bishops who are on the immoral side of the issue. Why? Because in the 21^st century, sexual intercourse must be considered ethical only if all the parties directly involved have agreed to the act and if they possess accurate knowledge of the consequences. This means that opposing the RH Bill because it aims to improve the state of sex education in the Philippines is immoral, since it will make our citizens ignorant of the consequences and responsibilities that come with having sex. Such ignorance translates to more cases of HIV infections/AIDS and more untimely pregnancies, both of which are truly detrimental to our country’s welfare.

Now, based on their statements, many enemies of the Bill seem to consider morality as synonymous to ignorance regarding sexual matters. For them, a scientifically-informed awareness of human sexuality is detrimental to the country’s moral health. One is reminded of anti-RH signs saying “Values education, not sex education”. What kind of bankrupt minds can think of such an  absurd and obviously false dichotomy?

Such moral idiocy on the part of the anti-RH camp makes the old Victorians look broad-minded. Given the desire of our country for economic, social and moral progress in the 21^st century, such moral idiocy should not be listened to in the halls of Congress. The RH Bill should be passed, and it should be passed as soon as possible.

No time should be wasted on having useless debates that have little or even nothing to do with the very real and pressing problem at hand.